Loup Supery: A glimpse into the polar regions

My love for nature ignited my love for photography. Being a mountaineer and a guide brings me to places most people never get the chance to visit. I started photographing those places to bring back memories and show my family and friends, which quickly developed in a passion of its own.

In 2018 I moved to Svalbard, Arctic Norway, and lived there for five years, working as a nature guide. As I developed my Arctic skills and explored, I became increasingly more fascinated by the local wildlife and the adaptations they have developed to survive in such an extreme environment, bringing me to focus a lot of my photography on the animals I encountered. As challenging as wildlife photography can be, it is also extremely rewarding and to me polar animals make it even more so. These hardy animals are evolving through incredible landscapes, and not only manage to survive but to thrive in environments that are so harsh little to no humans ever settled there. Being a mere visitor of their home is a humbling experience, especially when you are struggling to be comfortable or even survive yourself and see them completely at ease.

Some of the Arctic and Antarctic species have become emblematic, polar bears to name only one, but there is an astonishing variety of species living in the polar regions, and through the time I spent both in the Arctic and Antarctica, I have fallen in love with the iconic species as much as with others that are barely known to the public. Through the selection of images in this magazine, I am presenting some of the amazing animals roaming the frozen regions of our world as well as the astonishing landscapes they evolve in.

Many of these shots I took while guiding, and I hope you feel the same sense of wonder upon viewing the photos as my guests and myself have felt when seeing the animals in front of us.

Warm regards from some of the coldest places on Earth,

Loup